THENEWYORKER,AUGUST17, 2020 15
in, too, selling hand-painted tables,
special-edition books, and a selection
of fountain-pen inks. The gardener at
Charleston sold bunches of flowers
outside an antique shop. “We are ob-
viously at risk of permanent closure,”
Nicholson said.
The other day, Nicholson, who is
also an author and a historian, had a
Zoom call with her younger sister, the
designer Cressida Bell, about Charles-
ton’s future. Their father, the art his-
torian Quentin Bell, who grew up at
Charleston, had been instrumental in
saving the house the last time it was
in trouble. Nicholson, in a poppy-red
cardigan, was calling from her study,
in Sussex, surrounded by books and a
bust of her grandmother. Cressida was
in her studio, in East London’s Hackney
neighborhood, painting the base of a
table lamp. (Her work includes lamps,
textiles, stationery, and scarves, and she
runs a popular lampshade-painting work-
shop, now postponed.) Both women have
short blond bobs, glasses, and elegant,
angular faces.
They compared memories of the
house, where they spent summers and
weekends as children. Nicholson was
only five years old when Vanessa died
(Cressida was one), but she remembers
being painted by her grandmother at
Charleston. “They paid six pence an
hour,” she said, of modelling. “I loved
the studio best, because it was the only
warm room in the house.”
“I loved the dining room,” Cres-sida said. “I love the fact that the walls
are black, almost charcoal.” Vanessa
would always sit at the same place at
the wide, circular table, which was
painted with rings of pastel yellow,
pink, and green. The plates, painted
by Vanessa and Grant, were all dif-
ferent, and the children fought over
them. (Cressida loved an orange-and-
turquoise one.)
On Saturdays, Cressida would visit
the house to make pottery with her fa-
ther and spend time with Grant, whom
they regarded as a beloved grandfather.
“He had this wonderful slew of gay
admirers,” Cressida recalled. “It never
struck any of us that it was odd or pe-
culiar that we had, on that side of the
family, three grandparents instead of
the usual two,” Nicholson added.
When the sisters stayed overnight,
they braved the baths (scalding hot
and scummy), and the camp beds in
the attic, where they slept. “The attic
wasn’t very luxurious, but it was full of
very exciting things,” Nicholson said.
A doll’s house, a dress-up closet, an old
typewriter.
“The butterfly chest!” Cressida said.
She had almost finished the lamp, an
order for a customer in Texas. She held
up its matching shade: blue-green with
a leafy pattern.
Nicholson was feeling nostalgic.
“Charleston still smells the same to me.
It smells like turpentine and old books,”
she said. “You can feel the ghosts.”
—Anna Russell“Seagulls aren’t about food anymore—now they want experiences.”• •
called Charleston, in Sussex. The bath-
water was cold, and the tenants had
given animals the run of the rooms,
but the garden was charming—“a
pond, and fruit trees, and vegetables”—
and Bell moved her household there
in 1916. She brought her lover, Dun-
can Grant, his lover David Garnett,
and her two children by her husband,
Clive, who was waiting out the war
elsewhere. (Complicated but harmo-
nious.) The farmwork enabled the
men, both conscientious objectors,
to avoid conscription, and the house
offered the family an idyllic, secluded
retreat from the outside world, not
unlike the one imagined by Woolf for
her character Orlando, who “naturally
loved solitary places, vast views, and
to feel himself for ever and ever and
ever alone.”
One benefit of idyllic retreats is pri-
vacy; another is freedom in décor. Bell
and Grant, both artists, treated Charles-
ton like a canvas, painting the walls, the
furniture, the doorways: a God of Sleep
bed frame and a Ballet Russes log box.
They painted their visitors, too, among
them Roger Fry, Lytton Strachey, E. M.
Forster, and John Maynard Keynes, who
had his own bedroom. In the garden,
they had zinnias and narcissus, sweet
peas and dahlias, a tiled pond and a pi-
azza. For decades, Charleston served as
a Bloomsbury watering hole. Then its
occupants gradually died off, and it fell
into decline. In 1980, a trust was estab-
lished, and the house was restored; it
hosted paying visitors and an annual
literary festival, which this year would
have featured Gloria Steinem and Sal-
man Rushdie.
“That’s all gone down the tubes,
and we are seriously worried,” Virginia
Nicholson, the president of the Charles-
ton Trust and Bell’s granddaughter,
said recently. A truncated version of
the festival (“Charleston at Home”)
took place online, but the house re-
mains closed because of the pandemic.
This is a problem. Charleston is self-
funded: its income comes from foot
traffic (banned), the festival (cancelled),
and gift-shop sales (online only). In
March, the trust launched an emer-
gency appeal for donations. Emily
Maude, an artist in Brighton, ran an
Instagram auction, which raised about
fifty-five thousand pounds. Fans pitched